I work in IT, and spend my days getting to grip with abstract concepts - real brain stretching stuff.

My Italian is good enough that language is rarely a problem, but what I have noticed is that it's much easier to understand a new concept when someone American, British etc. explains it to me.

Is it merely a difference in the way we think, or are Italians bad at explaining things?

I think it's a language question. No matter how fluent you may be in a foreign language, that's still what it is: A Foreign Language. I consider myself to be perfectly fluent in English, I use English on a daily basis and never have a problem - but it is easier to learn something new in my mother tongue. I'm not quite sure why, it just goes faster... it could have something to do with how references are made and used, I don't know. I don't have an answer, but I know exactly what you mean

DFM, I've found myself in similar situations here. Sometimes an Italian will be explaining something and they'll be going on and on and as I'm beginning to find myself getting a bit lost I ask myself what the teacher actually just said and I realise I did understand, but he could have said it in a much clearer, direct way. What I'm trying to say is that sometimes they go around the houses to explain something when it could be said much more concisely.

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Originally posted by Delina:
DFM, I've found myself in similar situations here. Sometimes an Italian will be explaining something and they'll be going on and on and as I'm beginning to find myself getting a bit lost I ask myself what the teacher actually just said and I realise I did understand, but he could have said it in a much clearer, direct way. What I'm trying to say is that sometimes they go around the houses to explain something when it could be said much more concisely.

I think we're getting closer to the point here.

I always found the greatest clarity (humour and truth too for that matter) in as few words as possible. Perhaps that is different in Italy.

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Perhaps that is different in Italy.

Also, with people of Italian descent!

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Originally posted by Gil:

Also, with people of Italian descent![/QUOTE]

I haven't found that unless the people of Italian descent grew up in Italy! We don't inherit our parents cultures - maybe tiny bits of it - but not the way a person who grows up in a place does. I'm half Swedish but am not at all Swedish myself. I didn't grow up there and don't speak the language! Yes, I visited my grandparents several times as a kid but didn't spend enough time in Sweden to really absorb any of the culture. The only Swedish things I've inherited are blonde hair and a love of Swedish food.

Anyway, I agree - I don't think clarity and being to the point are culturally valued here. Another example are Italian websites. I've noticed that they are often incredibly "busy" and, to my mind, difficult to navigate.

As far as I can see Italians tend to talk around a subject and often never actually finish the point (how can they when the two people they are talking to will start taling on top of them). My Italian wife who lived in the US ten years says that English is a much easier language to express oneself in. Maybe it has something to do with the language itself. English is not really a pretty language it's a language of communication, I mean stop yapping and get to the point kind of lingo. Where as Italian is pretty and melodic and using it is a bit of an art form. It's not what you say but how you say it that's important.

You don't know my relatives. Where is Danse when I need him???

You should meet my dad. He left Sweden 45 years ago (when he was 25) yet he still talks like the Swedish chef, eats sil every day, goes to the Swedish Lutheran church, cooks only Swedish food, owns a house filled with Swedish furniture and appliances (elextrolux, IKEA and Ericsson), listens to Evert Taub and cries, gets depressed in the winter, makes snow lanterns cooks a smorgasbord of Swedish goodies at Christmas (including making his own sausages!) and wears a lot of Gotlandic black wool clothing.

However, that doesn't make me a Swede. When I go there, I'm a foreigner. In fact, even my dad is kind of a foreigner in Sweden now as he hasn't lived there in 45 years.

Danse's relatives live in Naples from what I understand - so they ARE Italian (or at least Neapolitan). He's not, though, since (from what I understand) he grew up in the US. Most of his posts are about how different/exotic his relatives are.

It sounds like your Dad is trying to live life as he remembers growing up as most of my family did and some of us still do. My brother, sisters and I (?) never ate anything but Italian (ok Italian-American) food until we were forced to eat hot lunch in grade school. When we ate at friends houses we usually ate something when we got home.

The first time I ate Indian (not Native American) food was when my son graduated college. Maybe, this is why I wouldn't miss international foods. Well, I guess I would miss my yearly kielbasa, once in a Blue Moon a few bowls of cabbage soup and hunks of smoked shoulder and a nice French Canadian pork pie.

Just to give you an idea of how much my dad's "Sweden" has ceased to exist (and he is of course aware of this!) My dad grew up in a village of around 200 people on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. Farfar (ie grandpa) owned the village shop, where they sold everything from horse shoes to silk stockings to cattle feed to toys at christmas (which dad got to play with before they were sold .) Just about everyone else in the village was a farmer apart from the priest and the schoolteacher. Dad went to school in a one room schoolhouse, there was no "high school" in his village (he had to board with a "city" family in the main town on the island at age 12 to attend high school) and the toilet was a pit toilet outside (and Sweden is cooold! )

Now, the island of Gotland is a prime tourist destination, overrun with vacationing Stockholmers. Most of dad's relatives sell souvenirs now rather than horseshoes and cattle feed! Movie stars vacation there, Ingmar Bergman lived on a little island off the coast of Gotland (Faro) and there are only 2 farming families left in dad's village - the rest are all city people with vacation homes or retirees. The house where dad grew up is owned by a family from Stockholm who spend summers there.

So just that one village has changed exponentially in the last 45 years and the country as a whole has gone through huge social and other changes. The same is true for Italy, the US and just about every other country in the world.

As they say, the past in another country. And when you leave that country for a long time you become a foreigner and your children even more so.

In the UK there has been a campaign for many years to make English notices and signs simpler to understand and read - in Italy wordiness is seen as being better not worse. At the moment, the bus company in Bologna are doing customer surveys. This is what they say about them (notice on the bus):

"Le rilevazioni statistiche hanno lo scopo di cogliere con precisione le esigenze di chi utilizza abitualmente l'autobus per i propri spostamenti e di rendere il servizio sempre più rispondente alle aspettative dell'utenza."

Basically - "We want to find out what our customers needs are and improve our service".

I think that sometimes this rather wordy way of explaining simple concepts is the reason why us foreigners can find it difficult to follow a discourse in Italian. We know the words but can't quite believe how many of them there are!

To get back on topic...

I agree, C in Bo - the wordiness thing is just insane sometimes in Italian.

I often do legal translations from Italian to English and legal Italian has to be seen to be believed. I thought legal English was bad but it's nothing compared to this stuff. I usually just cut out all the bullsh*t and boil it down to one sentence or so in English...which can unnerve Italians who see it.

IMO - lawyers do this as it makes them appear wise and all-knowing. Man behind the curtain, basically. And it seems to be worse here for some reason.

Elizabeth Gilbert mentions this in her book (Eat, Pray, Love) and it's something my Italian professors have told us. Way back, long before Italy was unified, every region had its own dialect and basically the language of Dante (Florentine dialect) was chosen to be the official Italian language. So while it is very beautiful it's not the language of commerce but of art. This is very unique.

English is precise. When I try to read magazines in Italian it takes a minute to realize what the article is about. I can't even imagine watching a trial in Italian.

re: What Gil said, I grew up in a town with a very large Italian-American population. I remember sitting in my Econ class and our teacher telling the Italian-American kids to get to the point.

www.sistergirltales.blogspot.com

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Originally posted by nyc/caribbean ragazza:
re: What Gil said, I grew up in a town with a very large Italian-American population. I remember sitting in my Econ class and our teacher telling the Italian-American kids to get to the point.

I guess that's the essence of it. I wanna understand something, talking is just a mechanism to achieve this. The less talking, the easier it is to understand.

Oh lord help me understand why it's so different here!

I enjoyed reading this thread so much that it inspired a blog entry with links, that has brought in more comments and observations. stop by: www.culturalmoments.blogspot.com. Elizabeth

I can totally relate to this! In my job searching, I've been having my italian friend help me writing reply emails and such...he _always_ writes these extremely lengthy emails just to say one or two points. I end up butchering it, chopping paragraphs to one or two sentences. Maybe because I'm an american, I can't stand beating around the bush! Just get to the point already!

I remember working in Siena, and when I tried to write something in Italian, my boss would say: your Italian is English! When teaching, I would tell my Italian students: this isn't English, it's Italian. Sometimes in order to figure what they were trying to say, I had to mentally translate it back into Italian. A translator friend (English to Italian) used to calculate her fees based on 700 English=1000 Italian words.

What works so beautifully in one language just doesn't in another: why language and culture are so closely connected I guess! And the reason English has won out (so far) as the N.1 popular global language is its efficiency, time being money etc, we don't waste it on beautifully constructed sentences.

Umm...I've read some pretty beautifully constructed English sentences in my time. Ever read Graham Greene? Jane Austen aint no slouch either.

I don't thing English is the number 1 world language because of its brevity. In that case Russian or maybe Dutch or German would be world languages - they're even more concise. English is the number one world language because it's the language that Americans speak and they have dominated the world stage during the 20th century. I suspect Chinese may supercede English this century.